We’re thrilled that Bruce recently agreed to launch our lamb program, and beginning in April 2012 will begin (has begun) supplying us year round well finished, market lambs.

Farm to Market : 235 Miles

Suckling Lamb
Spring Lamb is traditional in both Easter and Passover feasts.  Join in this tasty tradition.  Quantities are limited, ORDER NOW!

Our Easter lambs (also known as baby lambs) weigh 20-25lbs and come from Woolley Sheep Farm in Rutland NY. The meat is tender and delicious.  Perfect for slow roasting in a home oven, smoker or on the grill — we are happy to give you cooking tips no matter what method you choose.  A classic Easter feast for any sized group, Easter lamb is a special treat we carry only once a year.

We sell our tasty Spring Lambs by the ‘half lamb’ and quantities are limited – ORDER A HALF LAMB TODAY!

ADD OFFAL! ($10)
Because we sell the lambs by the half, we sell the offal (head, heart, and liver and testicles) separately.  All are vacuum sealed for freshness and easy freezing.

Easter Ham
Not feeling lamb?? Have an Easter Ham! A classic, city-style, boneless ham. Brined for seven days and smoked for twenty hours with hickory and applewood. Moist and tender, with perfectly balanced salty, sweet, and smoky flavors.  Excellent for slow roasting and applying your favorite glaze. ORDER A HAM FOR YOUR HOLIDAY HERE!

Passover Brisket
We’ve got a limited number of briskets available (there are only 2 per animal).  Our delicious briskets are from Wrighteous Organics in Schoharie NY (our main beef supplier) and weigh 8-11lbs.  Call 212 242 2630 to place an order!

Choose from our three tasty options, which can be ordered by the 2 foot section (so you can mix and match):

• Dickson’s Muffuletta- Spicy Cappacolla, Smoked Ham, and Beef Salami (a new addition!) with Cheddar Cheese and Spicy Olive Tapenade.
• Roast Beef Sandwich- Rare Roast Beef, Horseradish Mayo, Butter and Red Onion Slaw.
• Pastrami- Rolled Beef Pastrami, Mayo, Spicy Mustard and House Kraut.

6 Foot Sub ($260) Feeds 20-23
4 Foot Sub ($180) Feeds 12-14

Call To Order Call 212-242-2630!  All sub orders must be placed by Friday 5pm!

• Corned Beef Sandwich w/ House-Made Russian Dressing 11

• Roast Pork Sandwich w/ Preserved Chilies 9

• House-Made 100% Beef Hot Dog 5

add Chow Chow & kewpie mayo +.50

add Kimchi & kewpie mayo +.50

add Preserved Chilies & kewpie mayo +.50

add Chili! +1

• NY Beef & Bean Chili 7

Cold Lunch

Homestyle Meatloaf Sandwich 7

Roast Beef Sandwich 8

Pastrami Sandwich 8

Chicken Salad Sandwich 7

Smoked Ham & Cheddar 8

Dickson’s Muffaletta 9

Sides

• Zapp’s Potato Chips 1.5
• Water 1.5
• Gus Soda 2.5

Roasted Chickens come out of the oven at 3pm.  Take one home today!  Call to reserve yours: 212.242.2630

House-Made Hot Dog 5 each

add Chili! +1

add Chow Chow +.50

add Kimchi & Kewpie Mayo +.50

add Preserved Chilis +50

Chili (NY Beef & Beans) 7

SIDES

Zapps Potato Chips 1.5

Water 1.5

Gus Soda 2.5

Cold Sandwiches are not available on Sunday.

Our Easter lambs (also known as baby lambs) weigh 20-25lbs and come from Woolley Sheep Farm in Rutland NY. The meat is tender and delicious.  Perfect for slow roasting in a home oven, smoker or on the grill.  A classic Easter feast for any sized group.  Easter lamb is a special treat we carry only once a year!

Worried about cooking a whole/half lamb at home?  Check out this easy recipe from Roman-Style Easter Lamb from Saveur or this one for Spanish-Style Roast Suckling Lamb

Offal ($10)
Because we sell the lambs by the half, we sell the offal (head, heart, and liver and testicles) separately.  All are vacuum sealed for freshness and easy freezing.   Add offal to my order!

Butchering Options
In the shop, we’ll butcher your lamb if you so desire.  $5 for basic primals (shoulder, legs, loin) up to $30 (fully broken down to retail cuts, tied roasts, frenched racks…).  Please call once your order has been placed to discuss if you’d like to go this route.

ORDER A LAMB

We’re also taking orders for our Easter Hams!

A classic, city-style, boneless ham. Brined for seven days and smoked for twenty hours with hickory and applewood. Moist and tender, with perfectly balanced salty, sweet, and smoky flavors.  Excellent for slow roasting and applying your favorite glaze.

ORDER A HAM

Bob Comis operates Stony Brook Farm in Schoharie New York where he and his wife pasture raise heritage breed pigs, lamb, goat and poultry. In his posts, Bob shares his thoughts on farming, regional food systems, and how it all could be better and different.

Recently, I have made the argument in a couple of different articles (here and here) that in order to make local-regional meat broadly affordable and accessible, we should make a shift from the direct markets (farmers markets, CSAs, on-farm sales) to the existing indirect, arms length markets of supermarkets (and mom and pop groceries and butcher shops).

Coming from me, if you know my politics and you know the history of my writings, this is a shocking claim. Nevertheless, I have been thinking about it very hard over the last few days, in light of the comments I have received, and I do still think it is the right thing to do. Given our meat-intensive culture, it is unfair to ask people of limited means to eat only cheap cuts and/or to substantially reduce their meat consumption. As I argued yesterday, bucking one’s cultural impulses often takes Herculean efforts. Being poor is challenging enough already; we shouldn’t also force counter culturalism on poor people. As much as I dislike our culture of rampant, unbridled meat consumption, I think, until we are able to change that culture — and I truly hope we are able to — that poor people have as much right to it as the well-off. I believe it so strongly that I see making local-regional meat broadly affordable and readily available as an ethical imperative.

Why, or how, is it that when supermarkets are so much a part of our food, socio-economic, and health problems that it could possibly be supermarkets that can answer this call? It’s something like sleeping with the enemy, isn’t it?

Yes, and no.

First, I need to admit right up front that this effort could fail miserably, for a few reasons.

1. As far as being able to gather enough local-regional meat together to be able to satisfy the daily needs of supermarkets, I might very much be putting the cart before the horse. Without the necessary infrastructural developments already in place, making this effort might be impossible.
2. We can only move into supermarkets if it means not compromising our farming ethics, especially as it relates to animal welfare, environmental/ecological concerns, and our belief that farmers should be fairly compensated for their work. It might be possible that supermarkets are unwilling or unable to pay farmers what they need to be paid without compromising those values.
3. Even if we can get local-regional meat into supermarkets, it might only be possible by pricing meat at levels that are still out of the reach of people of limited means.

Nevertheless, right now, at this moment, I believe that supermarkets are the only way to make local-regional meat as broadly affordable and readily available as I would like to make it. As I have said, I want local-regional sales to account for 30% of total sales, not 2%.

In terms of expanding access by making local-regional meat more broadly available and affordable, volume is the key. Currently, local-regional agriculture is carried out very much on a small scale. Each individual farm produces a low-volume of meat. Many, perhaps most, of these farms raise a dozen or two, maybe thirty, or as many as forty pigs per year.

Dickson’s Farmstand Meats, the butcher shop I work with in New York City, alone needs thirty pigs per month. That means that in order to satisfy his needs, Jake Dickson would need to work with twelve different low-volume farmers in order to meet his needs. That would be a logistical and bookkeeping nightmare, not to mention that working with so many farmers substantially increases the likelihood that a farmer here and there is going to flake out and either not make a delivery or come up short or not send the sort of animal (finish-wise) that she/he promised. So, instead, Jake sought out and found just a few local-regional farmers to work with that are farming on a larger scale than the typical low-volume local-regional farm, including me. Working with fewer farmers substantially reduces the time it takes to manage logistics and bookkeeping, and it also makes it so the quality of the meat on offer at the shop is more consistent, and more reliably delivered, than it would be if it were coming from twelve different farms.

Jake’s is a small butcher shop, located in a high end market, frequented by people that are definitely not of limited means, so in spite of the fact that he is buying wholesale — I will sell him more than 250 pigs this year — he is able to compensate his farmers fairly. Those of us who are working with Jake are able to make a living.

What about a supermarket? Assuming that it would be possible for us to meet the volume needs of supermarkets, which would be substantially higher than at Dickson’s, would they be able (and willing) to compensate farmers fairly, especially if they were offering local-regional meat at more affordable prices?

I believe they would be able to, but not without us making some changes on our end. We would need to add to our plethora of small-scale local-regional farms a large number of mid-sized farms, composing an “agriculture of the middle,” that raise not a couple or a few dozen pigs per year, but 500-1,000+. If you think that in order to raise that many pigs, animal welfare or environmental/ecological concerns need to be compromised, check out Jude Becker’s operation (6,000 pigs per year), or Greg Gunthorp’s (1,000 pigs per year), or Paul Willis’s (2,500 pigs per year). Also, Animal Welfare Approved, which has the highest animal welfare standards around, has plenty of pig farmers farming at this scale.

Scale does two things. First, it makes it so the supermarkets can work with us. They wouldn’t be willing to work with 100 different farmers to meet their needs. Second, it means that the farmers that they do work with can be paid less for their pigs and still make a living. If the farmers are paid less, and we have done the hard work to convince supermarkets of the value of making local-regional meat more broadly affordable, then that lower compensation can translate into lower prices for local-regional meat on the supermarket shelves.

Will it ever be as cheap as industrial meat? No, and I have never argued that it would, or should, be. Will local-regional meat on the supermarket shelves be substantially cheaper than at farmers markets, on the farm, or through CSAs (none of which we should do away with, by the way)? Yes, absolutely, but once again, to get it there requires a shift in our approach to local-regional farming; it requires scaling up from low-volume farms to an agriculture of the middle, which can be, and where it already exists is, every bit as ethical and sustainable.

As ever, let’s get to work.

Bob Comis operates Stony Brook Farm in Schoharie New York where he and his wife pasture raise heritage breed pigs, lamb, goat and poultry. In his posts, Bob shares his thoughts on farming, regional food systems, and how it all could be better and different.

Usually when I make the argument that we should find ways to make local-regional meat more broadly affordable, someone will make an argument against my position by pointing out that local-regional meat, even at its current high prices, is already affordable. They argue that it is already affordable in two ways. 1) There are always cheap cuts that go for just a few dollars a pound. If you are a person of limited means, just forgo the expensive chops and steaks and go for the cheap cuts. And 2) Expensive local-regional meat can be made more affordable by eating less of it. If you are a person of limited means, just cut, substantially, your meat consumption.

I am a person in a situation that I think provides a worthwhile perspective on this argument. The position that I am in is that I want to see us make important cultural changes that will radically change the face of our farm and food systems, yet I myself find it difficult, or even impossible, to make the very cultural changes I call for. While some might call this hypocrisy, I call it admitting to being subject to the very real forces of culture.

You see, we are bound to our culture(s) in a fundamental, identitarian, way. In a very powerful way, we are our culture(s). Americans, for example, are meat eaters, heavy meat eaters. We eat a lot of meat. And, beyond that, we like the high end cuts, which industrial agriculture has made broadly affordable — center cut pork chops, for example, often go on sale at supermarkets for $2.00/lb or less. Ninety-nine percent of us approach meat consumption this way, though it is true that many of us cannot afford the high end cuts of even industrial meat. Those of us who can’t get our half pound per day from places like McDonald’s.

I argue regularly that we, as a culture, should eat less meat. But, at the same time, I continue to eat my normal share. Again, is this hypocrisy? Yes and no. Yes because I should act how I argue we should act. No because in making the argument I am imploring us, including myself, to act against our cultural impulses, that is, to act in direct opposition to our very identities; put simply, to be counter cultural.

Counter culturalism has a long history. People have been acting against the grain of their cultural impulses for eons. However, one thing about counter culturalism has remained consistent through the ages — only a tiny minority of any given cultural population acts counter culturally. Occasionally, this tiny minority, or at least the ideas of this tiny minority, catch the imaginations of the vast majority, and, over time, or quite suddenly, the dominant, majority culture shifts, adopting the attitudes and behavior of the counter cultural movement, in effect making what was a minority counter culture, the majority dominant culture.

However, this is exceedingly rare. Take (western) vegetarianism as an example. Western vegetarianism has a centuries long tradition (note: NOT veganism, which is new). Yet, today, after literally centuries of counter cultural arguments in favor of vegetarianism, often made by some very famous and charismatic people, only about 1% of the population is vegetarian.

Why is that? Because culture dominates us. It makes us who we are. And, we are meat eaters. We want to see our chops, our steaks, our burgers, and our birds taking up most of our plates.

I wish this weren’t the case, and I will continue to argue that we should be otherwise, that we should change our dominant culture. I will continue to implore myself to be otherwise. And, it appears, at least for the near term, though I do feel some fissures forming, I will continue to disappoint myself.

How is it that someone that feels as strongly as I do about the importance of eating less meat — for so many powerful reasons — cannot eat less meat?

It is simple, really. Counter culturalism takes firm determination and stamina. That is, it takes sustained willfulness. It takes forcefulness to say no to the ideas in one’s head, to the face in the mirror. And, such sustained willfulness in the face of the power of one’s dominant culture is terribly rare. I wish it weren’t the case. If it weren’t so rare, change, positive change, would be so much easier to enact, but, then again, so would negative change.

The argument, therefore, that local-regional meat can easily be made affordable by choosing cheap cuts and/or eating less meat is specious. It is in fact deeply regressive as it takes as its driving principle forced counter culturalism. It demands of people, in an unfair, and unwarranted way that they, by dint of the fact of their limited means, act against the grain of their dominant culture, against their very identities — not because they themselves have arrived at a determined, invested counter cultural impulse, but because they are poor. While perhaps well-intentioned, people making such arguments are in fact being oppressive.

While I, too, am likely to be accidentally oppressive in other ways, when it comes to the affordability of local-regional meat, I am not, I refuse to be. It is not incumbent on the person of limited means to be Herculean, to act in counter cultural ways to make local-regional meat affordable. It is incumbent on us, the producers, processors, distributors, and more well off consumers of local-regional meat to find ways to make local-regional meat more affordable within our dominant cultural paradigm. (At the same time, however, we need to continue to act to change the dominant culture)

The ways to do so are pretty straightforward on paper, but will take a lot of work in practice. They are primarily infrastructural: we need to build local-regional production, processing, and distribution infrastructures that, once in place, will substantially cut the costs of local-regional meat. But, they are also cultural: for example, we absolutely do need to eat less meat — nevertheless, we need to reject forced counter culturalism as an answer to the problem of the high price of local-regional meat.

The movement is in motion. It is, for the most part as I see it, heading in the right direction. It is time now to take the next step, to move beyond the face-to-face markets (which are themselves counter cultural, but that is another post) to markets that are more broadly cultural, to markets — faceless though they might be — with infrastructures underlying them that are capable of making local-regional meat broadly affordable.

As ever, let’s get to work.

Bob Comis operates Stony Brook Farm in Schoharie New York where he and his wife pasture raise heritage breed pigs, lamb, goat and poultry. In his posts, Bob shares his thoughts on farming, regional food systems, and how it all could be better and different.

A couple of years ago at a farmer’s market a woman approached my stall, a little apprehensively. She looked old and beaten down. Her face was weathered and worn. Her hands looked rough and gritty. But, it was clear that she was younger than she looked. Her clothes were poor. Her jeans were worn thin around the knees and had faded spots of dirt here and there on her thighs. Before she even said a word, I imagined a life of hard work and hard times for her.

She came over to the stall and without looking up at me started looking over the meat case, and then after a moment, she fingered the edge of the price sheet for a moment and then picked it up to take a closer look.

As she looked, I waited, without saying anything, wondering how things were going to go. I had long ago stopped stereotyping people. Yes, I had imagined a hard life for her, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t willing to pay half a day’s wages on pasture-raised, local pork, or grassfed lamb. I’d been surprised by too many people to make that mistake again.

She carefully placed the price sheet back on the table and placed the small orange wee-bee little pumpkin paper weight back on top of it.

Then for the first time, she looked up at me. I smiled.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello,” she said, and then as we looked at each other silently for a moment, I was taken very much by surprise. Her eyes quickly welled up with tears; one slipped out and slid slowly down her cheek. She raised a hand up and wiped it off. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I replied.

“It’s just…it’s just that I am so frustrated.”

I didn’t say anything. It was clear that she wanted to speak her peace.

After a moment, still with tear filled eyes, she said, “You know, I want…,” she wiped another tear away, “…I want so badly to stop eating grocery store meat. It’s terrible. Terrible for you. It tastes terrible. It’s all full of crap, hormones, drugs, and God knows what.”

I nodded.

“But this,” she said, sweeping a hand over the meat case, “I just can’t afford it, any of it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, a little uncomfortable and slightly embarrassed. I looked away from her, around the rest of the farmers market. The people at the market were not monolithically well off, or white. It was not just soccer moms and exuberant well-off foodies. But, it was close.

I didn’t know what to say. I had often been confronted by people over the price of my meat. “That’s ridiculous!” “So expensive!” “Phhftt!” One old lady even said, “you should be ashamed!” Little did she know that I already was, always had been.

I had set out in farming with a mission, to offer ethically and ecologically raised meat at the lowest price possible, low enough even for people like the woman standing in front of me at that moment. But, I quickly discovered that this was a pipe dream. I couldn’t sell pork chops for less than $7.00/lb. and keep the farm going, and even at that price, my wife would still need to continue subsidizing the farm.

The low-volume, direct market system makes it impossible. The costs are simply too high. USDA slaughter and butchering alone doubles the cost of getting the animal to market. A lamb has $3.00/lb. of small-scale, local slaughter and butchering in it! A pig, $2.00/lb.

The woman standing in front of me had no idea how angry and frustrated I was. She had no idea that her tears were my tears. I had set out to make meat broadly affordable, but instead, I was selling exclusive, high priced meat to the well-off.

As she stood in front of me, we were both pissed off, but I didn’t let on. She was the one crying.

“I’ve heard so many good things about local meat, but I’ve never even been able to try it,” she went on. “I’ve heard it tastes better, it’s better for you.” Her eyes were drying up.

“It does,” I said, “and it is.”

She looked at me.

Without thinking about it, I reached into the meat case and pulled out a package of two center cut pork chops and placed them in a paper bag. I folded the top of the bag over itself a couple of times and held the package out in the space between us.

“Here,” I said, “I want you to have this. You should at least get to try it.”

“No,” she said, taking a half a step backwards. “I can’t just take it.”

“It’s okay, really. I want you to have it.”

“No.” She took another half a step backward.

I was about to lose her.

“OK, wait,” I said, holding up my free hand to keep her from walking away. “How about this. Take the chops. Try them. If you like them, then you can come back and pay me whatever you can afford. Does that work?”

She took a step forward returning to our shared space. I continued to hold the paper bag out between us.

“OK,” she said, reaching out to take the bag. She took the bag from me. “OK,” she said, “thanks.”

“No problem.”

“I’ll be back,” she said, “I will.”

“I know,” I replied.

She turned and walked away.

The next week, just as I finished up handing some change to a customer, I looked up and there she was, holding a ten dollar bill out towards me.

“That’s more than they cost,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I don’t care, they were awesome.”

“Keep it,” I said, “I wanted you to have them.”

“No,” she said, “take it,” in such a way that I knew I had better just take the money, so I did.

“Let me get you some change,” I said, opening the cash box.

“No,” she said, raising her hands up to her shoulders, arms bent at the elbows, hands palm out, taking a step back and starting to turn. “Keep it,” and then she walked away.

I closed the cash box and watched her walk away.

In spite of the fact that my interaction with that woman has been a driving force in my desire to scale up the farm so that I could be in a position where economies of scale would make it possible for me to lower the cost of my meat, I have failed miserably. Yes, now I raise over 400 pigs per year, but the meat is not any cheaper. In fact, because most of it is marketed through a butcher shop in Chelsea Market, it is even more expensive. But, I haven’t given up yet.

I believe I have an ethical obligation to find a way to provide real food security for people of limited means. Nobody should have to cry because they can’t afford real food, which is one of the reasons I want to sell my pork in Price Chopper.

Of course, real food security is not only about developing infrastructures to make it possible to get local meat into supermarkets like Price Chopper. There is cultural work to do as well, including changing the “race to the bottom” supermarket mentality. Supermarket executives and managers need to be convinced of the value of supporting farmers by paying decent prices for non-industrial meat, and in turn, taking less of a profit margin to keep the prices down to help provide real food security. That is asking a lot of large corporations acting in competitive markets.

Is it too much to ask? The corporate mantra is that all that corporations do is give customers what they are asking for. So, let’s call them on it. Let’s start asking for broadly affordable local-regional meat that supports our local-regional farmers by compensating them fairly.

No more tears. Real food security is an ethical imperative.

About Who’s Walking Who
An ardent advocate on behalf of dogs for approximately 20 years, Stacy Alldredge is a specialist in canine behavior problems including aggression, separation anxiety, Obsessive/ Compulsive Disorder, and fear issues; big challenges that regularly confront the urban dog and their guardians. more…

About Our Dog Food
The combination of Stacy’s expertise as a canine nutritionist for 20 years and Dickson’s locally and naturally raised meat has produced a healthy and delicious recipe for our best friends.  We make all of our dog food with the same meats sold in the Chelsea Market shop and fresh produce.  All of the cooking, grinding and packaging takes place at the butcher shop.

Today’s Menu

• Doggy Basic Blend
• Beef Knuckle Bones
  

Ordering (212-242-2630)
All orders must be placed by 8pm on Friday as we make our dog food fresh each Saturday.  We recommend ordering the total number of meals you need for the whole week.  Packages will keep for 7 days fresh in your refrigerator, or can be easily frozen.

To Order, Call Dickson’s Farmstand at 212-242-2630

Pickup
Our dog food is ready for pickup in the store on Sunday-Tuesday during our regular store hours (below).

Pickup Hours :
Monday & Tuesday 10am-8pm
Sunday 10am-7pm

Have questions, concerns or need advice about keeping your dog happy and healthy?
Contact Stacy and her team at wwwdogs@aol.com